Making A Holiday Martin Luther King Would Be Proud Of

December 10, 1985|By Diane Hubbard Burns of the Sentinel Staff

On Jan. 20, Martin Luther King Jr. will become the first American since George Washington to be honored with a federal holiday. But that holiday will not simply spring full-blown into Americans' collective consciousness.

For months, many people have been working behind the scenes to ensure that the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- the third Monday in January -- will be observed in a manner consistent with the objectives of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

They are people like Chuck Sadler, a career foreign service officer who is on loan to the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission in Washington, D.C. And people like Marvin Davies, Gov. Bob Graham's special assistant for minority affairs. Davies and his secretary constitute the entire staff for Florida's 109-member Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Celebration Commission.

Congress established the holiday to recognize King's birthday (Jan. 15) and created the 31-member federal commission to work just one year -- from March 1985 to April 1986 -- planning and assessing the observance of the new holiday. Its chairman is King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and it includes such leaders as Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

Both the national and state festivities will stick closely to the spirit of King's peaceful demonstrations for equal rights. In Atlanta, the birth and burial place of King and the home of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, a symbolic march will unite civil rights activists of the 1960s with present-day dignitaries.

St. Augustine, where King demonstrated and was arrested in 1964, will be the key city for Florida's observance of the holiday. Davies, who was executive director of the Florida chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1963 to 1971, demonstrated with King there. He said a prayer breakfast and a luncheon at which Graham will honor one or more distinguished black Floridians are being planned. Then there will be a memorial march and parade tracing the route of one of King's marches from the St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church to a site that once harbored St. Augustine's slave market. (Although federal employees will get a paid holiday on Jan. 20, Florida has yet to establish it as a paid state holiday.)

Plans to observe the holiday in Orlando are still in the making, but the observance is expected to include a parade and possibly a candlelight march, said city council member Mable Butler, who is co-chairman of the city's Martin Luther King Celebration Day Committee. In Eatonville -- where King's birthday has been observed as a town holiday since 1974 -- there are plans for a parade, a musical production about King's life and a daylong rally.

For Davies and others who have worked on the holiday plans, it is an effort close to the heart. ''We will step in his steps,'' said Davies, 52. ''We want the feeling of the '60s, and we want the heroes of those days to participate. They felt sadness then; now they can feel joy.''

Sadler, 57, is a native of South Carolina who spent 31 years overseas with the State Department. ''I missed the whole decade of the '60s,'' he said. ''This gives me a feeling not only of being connected with that time, but of being part of it.''